1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to techniques for detecting impending problems in computer systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for predicting the remaining useful life of a computer system.
2. Related Art
For many safety-critical applications of computers, it is not sufficient to know whether a computer is healthy or at risk; the user also needs to know the “remaining useful life” (RUL) for the computer with a high confidence factor. In fact, the United States Department of Defense has recently issued a requirement that all future mission-critical and safety-critical computers have RUL capability. An example where RUL estimation capability is important is for scenarios such as the following. Suppose one is planning a mission-critical operation (for example a battle situation) that may last 72 hours. Before committing an asset plus one or more human lives to the operation, one needs to know if the RUL of all computers aboard the asset is longer than 72 hrs, and it is useful to know this with a quantitative confidence factor.
In additional being crucial for life-critical applications, RUL estimation is also beneficial for many eCommerce applications for enterprise servers. For example, consider a scenario where a server at a customer datacenter starts issuing warning flags in the middle of a busy work day. In this situation, the account team would likely want to know if the problematic field replaceable unit (FRU) needs to be swapped as soon as possible; or if the server can continue operating until a scheduled shutdown on Saturday night. RUL estimation capability could add significant return on investment in such situations.
At present, the most commonly used technique for assessing the reliability of a computer system is to estimate a mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) for the computer system. However, a MTBF estimation is a fairly crude measure that provides little insight into how a long a computer system is likely to continue operating based on the current operational state of the computer system.
Hence what is needed is a system which provides users with an accurate estimation of remaining useful life for a computer system.